How do you spot a ‘performative’ male? Look for a tote bag

Hundreds of people gathered at a park in the Capitol Hill neighbourhood of Seattle for yet another look-alike contest in Aug 2025. Kind of.

Instead of searching for earthly versions of celebrities like Timothee Chalamet or Pedro Pascal, the spectators were looking for which of the assembled contestants was the best example of the so-called Performative Male – a relatively new social media archetype.

The Performative Male curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likeable to progressive women.

He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.

“It’s men who are trying to cater to what they think women who are feminist like,” said Ms Guinevere Unterbrink, 24, an art teacher who was one of the contest’s hosts.

Such a man might sip on iced matcha lattes at a cafe while reading Sally Rooney or Joan Didion. He might wear wired headphones and baggy pants, and he would most likely be carrying a tote bag (perhaps with a Labubu attached).

He could be listening to Clairo and would be quick to reveal his collection of vinyl records. He turns himself into a walking mood board of on-trend markers for softness, stylishness and a feminist leaning that he may or may not actually possess. And as a result, he has become a scoffed-at meme.

“A lot of the time, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Ms Lanna Rain, 24, the contest’s other host, said of the idea of performative men. “It’s just an aesthetic for them.”

Some have gone as far as calling the Performative Male an epidemic.

Online, users have posted stealth videos of the performative men they have spotted out in the wild or videos imagining what it would be like to date one of them.

And Seattle’s competition was not an aberration: In July, New York City hosted its own version in Washington Square Park and there was a similar contest in Jakarta, Indonesia, last week.

“It reminds me very much of being a poser” in the 1990s and early 2000s, said Ms Casey Lewis, a writer and founder of the After School newsletter, which focuses on Generation Z and internet culture.

The poser archetype was often depicted in popular romcoms and high school movies, like “Superbad”, where the two dorky protagonists try to play cool at parties to attract their crushes.

“There’s really nothing worse one can be than a poser,” she added.

The word performative – like the words woke or coded – has been on a transformative journey in the last few years, from philosophical concept (gender scholar Judith Butler, for example, argued that all of gender was performative) to common pejorative.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, and the surging Black Lives Matter movement, it was increasingly attached to words like activism or allyship to suggest that some of the people who showed support for certain causes did not actually care about those causes but were aligning themselves to appear moral.

The revamped usage of performative, particularly in reference to men, has surged in popularity.

On TikTok, videos tagged with #performativemale have been viewed more than 28 million times, while those tagged #performative have been viewed over 149 million times.

Since May, Google has seen increasing interest in questions like “Why is matcha performative?” and “Why are wired headphones performative?”

It is not all that surprising that Gen Z, which studies have shown prizes authenticity and honesty, would sniff out insincerity among peers.

But the archetype has emerged at a time when masculinity itself, and certain male-coded corners of the internet, continue to be a political lightning rod – at least in certain places.

“I’ve been in Florida for a couple of weeks – my husband and I are on a road trip – and I’ve not seen any ‘performative men’ here,” Ms Lewis said.

“It feels very much like it’s happening in areas where men feel like they need to be an ally. They are trying to navigate aligning themselves with women and signal like, ‘I’m a good guy.’”

It is also not surprising that some men are already leaning in on the joke and deliberately inviting, rather than dodging, accusations of performativity, said Mr Tony Wang, the founder of Office of Applied Strategy, a consulting and trend forecasting company.

Indeed, men are posting videos referring to themselves as Performative Males in their captions.

Many cheekily post videos of themselves reading dense books, upside down, or carrying three or four or five Labubus to exaggerate the aesthetic.

“There is something meta ironic about it,” Mr Wang said.

“It almost provides this level of armour or cover where the guy could be like, ‘Oh, I’m just being ironic, don’t take it too seriously.’”

Why else would they voluntarily participate in a contest that was not focused on their looks or their talents but rather on their personification of a meme?

In Seattle, some men showed up holding vinyl records and entire record players or wearing fake skinny moustaches, with tote bags swinging over their shoulders.

The contest featured three rounds of questions on topics related to the most basic understanding of feminism, Ms Unterbrink said. And the winner would go home with “The Will to Change” by feminist author Bell Hooks.

One man was asked if he knew what a diva cup was; he did not. A different contestant was asked if he knew the year that women got the right to vote; he did not.

That the term has already turned into a tongue-in-cheek insider joke encapsulates the broader nature of social media itself, Mr Wang said, where “everything, to a large degree, is a performance”.

He added, “RuPaul has this quote, ‘We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.’” NYTIMES